Donald J. Harris

Donald Jasper Harris, OM is a Jamaican-American economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, known for applying post-Keynesian ideas to development economics. Harris joined the Stanford faculty in 1972, when he became the first black scholar to be granted tenure in the Department of Economics. He retired in 1998, Harris grew up in Jamaica and in 1956 entered University College of the West Indies which was affiliated with the University of London. He received his BA in 1960 from the University and came to the United States in 1963 where he earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley (1966). He later became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Before becoming a faculty member at Stanford, Harris was an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) from 1968 to 1972, an assistant professor at Northwestern University from 1967-1968, and worked initially as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1966-1967. Throughout his career, Harris has worked with the Jamaican government serving as an economic advisor to several of the nation’s Prime Ministers. Donald Harris currently lives in Jamaica.